Swedish police have a message for anyone who thinks they’re talking to spam callers: hang up the phone, and embrace being rude.
Local authorities are teaming up with five national celebrities in a new campaign to empower people to push back against scam callers. Just like in the United States, scammers are a major issue. Polisen, Sweden’s national police force, estimates they made off with $575.3 million in ill-gotten gains in 2025 alone. And while online scams utilizing increasingly convincing generative AI tools are on the rise, the bulk of the money lost here came from old-fashioned phone scams.
“The message is simple: Dare to be rude – it could save you from being scammed,” Polisen wrote in a blog post promoting the campaign.
Citizens over 60-years-old are targeted most frequently, and this Swedish campaign is primarily trying to reach that demographic. The outreach includes testimonials from actors Suzanne Reuter, Lennart Jähkel, and Christina Schollin, as well as journalist Claes Elfsberg. They point out that politeness and a willingness to hear someone out, laudable qualities in most scenarios, are exactly what scammers look to exploit. When it comes to protecting oneself against a malicious scammer adept at social engineering, well, manners be damned.
“Many of us are raised to always be polite and accommodating, and there are many in my generation,” actor Reuter, best known for her role in the long-running comedy series Svensson, Svensson, said in a statement. “But today you have to dare to be a little more questioning. It’s not rude – it’s self-protection.”
Scammers use our emotions against us
The phone scams described by Swedish authorities tend to follow a similar pattern. Typically, victims first receive a text message claiming to be from an authority figure, such as a government official or bank representative. That message asks the recipient to call a phone number. Once on the call, the scammer will try to build trust with their target before eventually pivoting and creating a sense of urgency. In some instances, the scammer will try to convince their target that a crime is occurring and that they need to move their money to a different account quickly to prevent theft.
Scam attempts like these can seem obvious from the outside, but they’re effective for a reason. Sophisticated scammers are adept at finding the most effective ways to hijack human emotion and psychology. By establishing trust and then tapping into primal drives like fear, excitement, greed, and desire, a scammer can wear down the defense of an otherwise rational, skeptical person.
“When we’re under a very strong visceral influence, we are not able to recall information as readily,” Martina Dove, author of The Psychology of Fraud, said in a recent interview with the CBC. “So memory will suffer … it’s going to make them more impulsive.”
“When we’re under a visceral influence, we’re more likely to go along and be compliant and try to avoid whatever we perceive to be threatening to us,” Dove added.
According to Swedish authorities, the better option is to just hang up the phone at the first inkling of suspicion. That same general principle applies in person. Though less common in the U.S., another scam in Sweden and the Netherlands involves someone posing as a police officer at a victim’s door and requests money or valuables. Similarly, authorities say people shouldn’t feel rude about shutting the door on someone’s face if they seem suspicious.
Authorities want to keep people from getting scammed, but they also have another incentive. That same money swindled over the phone can then fund black markets and other, potentially more serious crimes. In addition to their public outreach, Swedish police say they have launched a nationwide operation focused on “top players” in scamming rings supposedly connected to organized crime. On the legal side, lawmakers recently passed new legislation requiring the country’s telecommunications companies to take more proactive measures to stop calls likely to be fraudulent.
Lawmakers in the U.S. tried something similar in 2019 with legislation requiring the Federal Communications Commission to mandate a caller ID authentication framework called STIR/SHAKEN. However, as anyone who uses a phone today can attest, it’s had only limited success.
The scale of scams in the U.S. can make Sweden’s situation feel quaint by comparison. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission estimates people lost somewhere around $3.5 billion to imposter scams. And like Sweden, those scams disproportionately target older citizens. Americans, it turns out, could probably stand to get a bit ruder on the phone as well.
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The post Sweden’s solution to stop spam callers: Be ruder! appeared first on Popular Science.
